Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

Unfortunately, some of the applications (like GDM Tweaker) you could use to change the GDM login screen background / GTK theme no longer work with GNOME 3 / GDM 3, so here is how to change the GDM3 theme or background manually, via command line.

Update: this doesn't seem to work in Ubuntu (both 11.04 and 11.10), but it works in Fedora and Arch.

To change the GNOME 3 (with GDM3) login screen background, use the following commands:

In the last command above, replace "FILE.JPG" with the picture you want to use as the GDM3 login screen background.

Please note that you must specify a file which user "gdm" has permission to read, that's why I've used file:///usr/share/backgrounds/. For instance, user "gdm" cannot read files in your home directory.

In the same way you can also change the GNOME 3 login screen GTK theme (first 3 commands are the same):